Helena Maria Viramontes’ The Moths Essay -- Moths Viramontes Essays

Helena Maria Viramontes The Moths I was initially emaciated to Helena Maria Viramontes story The Moths due to the striking similarities between the narrators experience and my ownexperience with being thrust into the bureau of caretaker for a dying lovedone. By tracking a materialization girls transformation through dealings withsubjugation (by her culture), liberty (through her grandmother), death (ofher grandmother) and grief, Viramontes successfully paints an endearing tale of change. The Moths emphasizes the narrators conquering by herhouseholds religion and by the social structures associated with it, pose by the freedom for development available deep down the nativecurandera wont taught by her grandmother. Through vivid yet subtle symbols, the author weaves a complex web with which to showcase the narrators oppressive upbringing. Two literarycritics whose methods/theories relinquish us to better comprehend Viramontesmessage are Jonathan Culler and Stephen Gree nblatt. Culler points out that we establish literature differently than we rent anything else. According to the intertextual theory of how people read literature, readers make assumptions (based on details) that they would not make in real life.During these leaps within which we transform facts into values/themes, thereader creates supplementary meaning to the text by unconsciously setting up tension, also called binary opponent. Culler describes this process in his statement The process of thematic interpretation requires us to move from facts towards values, so we tin can develop each thematic complex, retaining the opposition between them (294). though supplementary meaning created within the text can take some(prenominal) forms, within V... ...eedom was found and cultural boundaries were not shattered, simply battered, the narrators path was much preferable to that of her sisters (those who conformed to cultural boundaries). Through this story we can see how oppressi on in certain cultures changes individuals differently, creates tension between those who do not wish to be subjugated and those doing the subjugating, and we see the integral opposition between the path of Catholicism and that of curandismo.WORKS CITEDContexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey. New York McGraw Hill, 2003.________________. Jonathan Culler. Structuralism and Literature.288-297________________. Stephen Greenblatt. Culture. 436-441The Norton Anthology of brusk Fiction. Ed. Cassel & Bausch. New York W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. Helena Maria Viramontes. The Moths 870-874